Although it is far from uncharted territory, some contemporary thinkers have been pushing the idea that imagination plays a central role in perception; specifically, as that which explains the phenomenon of perceptual presence. I agree with this general idea. However, there is a tendency among thinkers to place the vague notion of mental imagery at the core of their understanding of what it is to imagine; and attempts to explain perceptual presence in imagistic terms are incompatible with the phenomenology. I will consider another view that attempts to explain perceptual presence in terms of our possession of a form of implicit bodily knowledge of the ways one can access the world. Although it does not encounter the same issues as the imagery view, I will argue that there is much more to the phenomenon of presence than can be accounted for on the access view. I will propose an alternative that can be attributed to Merleau-Ponty. This alternative involves both appeal to a form of bodily knowledge and an imaginative capacity for entertaining the possibility of being situated otherwise; that, when exercised, gives rise to the presence of objects in experience as the objects that they are.

Cosmopolitans who take principles of distributive justice to apply globally have long struggled with the legacy of Rawls. Some parts of Rawls’s view seem to support cosmopolitanism although he rejects this position himself. Samuel Scheffler and Miriam Ronzoni have each identified resources in Rawls’s work that open the door to cosmopolitan conclusions but differ from those traditionally cited by cosmopolitans. Scheffler and Ronzoni argue that changing social circumstances, like those involved in globalization, may affect the scope of principles of distributive justice. But they also both take it to be an open question whether such principles have global reach presently. I argue that this reticence is not justified. Their arguments suggest that principles of distributive justice have long applied globally. Indeed, the view so strongly favors cosmopolitanism that further argument is needed to secure any room for unique domestic principles of distributive justice. I follow Rawls’s lead and draw on Kant to indicate how such an argument might go. Finally, I argue that although the scope of principles of distributive justice is less historically contingent than Scheffler and Ronzoni suggest, there is still considerable room in this view for the evolution of institutions to shape the content of such principles.

The goal of this chapter is to explain the normative force of personal projects and the project-dependent reasons they generate. Scheffler argues that it is not wrong to ignore project-dependent reasons. I point to three considerations that aim to show, pace Scheffler, that it is wrong to simply ignore the project-dependent reasons we once acknowledged. First, it is a condition for valuing a particular project that we have reasons to continue to respond to project-dependent reasons, even in cases where the project has been completed, where circumstances have forced us to abandon it, or where we have become less prone to value the project positively. Second, it is the fact of having once attained meaning in our lives by valuing a particular project that explains why we face additional reasons to sustain the project and to continue to respond to the project-dependent reasons we once acknowledged. Third, to the extent that a particular project accounts, in part at least, for our normative identity, and provided that it is valuable to thereby have conditions for having reasons at all, we have a further explanation of why project-dependent reasons carry a particular normative force for us to continue to value that project.

This paper argues in favour of a desire-based account of normativity. In addition, it demonstrates that the view is particularly well-placed to answer ‘bootstrapping’ objections. Such objections have previously been taken to be a problem not just for desire-based accounts, but for a variety of other subjective accounts of practical normativity.

I will begin by explaining desire-based accounts of normativity, and then by explicating two different kinds of bootstrapping objection: one about normative conflicts, and one about normativity coming from the wrong kind of source. Both objections, I will show, can be answered with a clear explanation of what makes desire-based accounts of normativity so attractive: their ability to explain practical normative force. As such, this paper aims to go further than simply being a new response to a popular objection, or a new argument in support of a controversial view. It will also contribute to a better understanding of practical normativity itself, and how the nature of the normativity depends on and changes with the corresponding desire.

This paper analyses the tension between the double focus on critique and alterity within decolonial discourses. We argue that an excess of critical thinking could lead to scepticism, whereas an overemphasis on alterity could result in dogmatism. Consequently, since both approaches end up obstructing epistemic decolonization, we argue that it is necessary to strike a balance between critique and alterity; a balance that does not resolve the tension, but seeks to reveal its underlying relation. The first section locates decolonial theory within the framework of critical theory. We highlight how Quijano, Dussel and Mignolo invoke the critical tradition, whilst simultaneously claiming that a radical departure from it is necessary. Turning more explicitly to Dussel in Section 2, we explain Dussel’s analectics as a method to localize discourses, in which globally excluded perspectives are foregrounded. In the third section, we defend Dussel’s universalism and rationalism against criticisms from Castro-Gómez and Vallega by interpreting him as a relational thinker. Ultimately, the paper concludes that the success of epistemic decolonization hinges on its ability to reconcile classic notions of universality and rationality in a manner that avoids dogmatism and scepticism, namely by a continual grounding of philosophical discourse in material life.

It has been argued that assertion is governed by both a knowledge norm and a surety norm. According to a standard view (Unger, 1975; Williamson, 2000), the knowledge norm is more fundamental. The surety norm can be derived from the knowledge norm. This orthodoxy has recently been challenged. Goodman and Holguin (2022) have argued for an alternative picture in which the surety norm is more fundamental. The knowledge norm can be derived from the surety norm and a further norm according to which one should be sure only of what one knows. In this paper, I defend the orthodox view from Goodman and Holguin’s challenges. I provide objections to their account of how the knowledge and surety norms are related and to their arguments against the orthodox view.

The distinction between doing and allowing (DDA); intentional and non-intentional agency (DDE); and agent-relative versus agent-neutral values have been invoked to support the deontological nature of moral thought. Consequentialists claim that, since these distinctions can be incorporated into value theory, all plausible deontological theories ultimately reduce to consequentialism. I argue: first, that while the DDA and DDE can be framed in agent-neutral terms, they must be interpreted in agent-relative terms; second, that even when interpreted in agent-relative terms, the DDA and DDE compel non-consequentialist understandings; and third, that these three distinctions function as non-consequentialist constraints on deliberation about action, thus resisting attempts to ‘consequentialize’ them. The conclusion is that, far from being a mere variant of consequentialism, deontology is a distinct moral theory—one that offers a principled rejection of the consequentialist ‘compelling idea’ that it is always permissible to bring about the outcome with the best possible consequences.

What is the relation between what is good for you and how well you are doing? It is common and natural to think that the latter asymmetrically depends upon the former. I call this the molecular model of well-being, which holds that how well you are doing depends directly upon the presence of independently specifiable welfare goods in your life. Just about every contemporary theory of well-being embodies the form specified by the molecular model. Here I articulate and defend an alternative way to think about well-being, a way based upon the notion of approximation. According to the approximation model of well-being, how well you are doing directly instead depends upon how closely you resemble an ideal way to live. One person is doing better than another just in case the life of the first more closely approximates the ideal life. To make this case I briefly sketch a substantive theory of well-being that employs it: what I take to be Aristotle’s view of well-being, which works as a proof of concept. We see that the approximation model of well-being can explain some patterns of value better than the molecular model can.

Neopragmatists – some of whom might be called ‘global expressivists’ – reject metaphysics and take talk of concepts to be talk of the mastery of contingent linguistic practices that have been shaped by human nature. As a result, it may seem much harder for them to account for the sorts of necessary connections – whether conceptual or metaphysical – defended in so much of contemporary analytic philosophy. In some cases, this is right: the connections are really there, and neopragmatists will have to rise to the challenge of explaining them. But in other cases, it may turn out that the putative necessary connections are illusions that neopragmatist lenses can help one see through. In this paper, I try to reveal the workings behind one illusion and to rise to one challenge. In each case the point is a double one; to shed light on the first-order issue and to illustrate the virtues of neopragmatism as a general approach to philosophical problems. And there is a third point: that in some cases the philosophically interesting conclusion about a set of related concepts will only be that there are some ‘for the most part’ connections between them.

In the entirety of his corpus, Spinoza uses the phrase ‘simplest bodies’ [corporibus simplicissimis] exactly twice and never offers an explanation of what it means. That said, it appears to play a fundamental role in his thought. This paper evaluates two twentieth-century readings of Spinoza in order to present a new original theory of simplest bodies. Ultimately, I present a reading of Spinoza which accepts a nuanced amalgamation of these accounts. I argue that the right understanding of Spinozistic simplest bodies is something like the following: simplest bodies are portions of extension featuring motive homogeneity among their necessarily infinite parts. For Spinoza, simplest bodies thus feature no mereological simplicity at all, but rather only motive simplicity, in that they are properly characterized by a single ratio of motion and rest.

The relationship between political philosophy and real-life politics is one that is heavily contested. On the one hand, it has been argued that political affiliation is a biasing force that stands in the way of our ability as political philosophers to maintain an objective perspective (Van der Vossen, 2015; 2020). On the other hand, it has been argued that political philosophers run the risk of bias whether they are politically active or not (Jones, 2020). In this paper, I nuance the debate at hand: I specify what kind of activism we should be concerned with as a biasing force, elaborate on what biases we should aim to mitigate as political philosophers, as well as what tools we have at our disposal in combatting biases within the discipline. This allows me to argue that participation in certain forms of political activism can be a powerful method for avoiding the most pernicious and pervasive biases we are prone to, namely biases against marginalised groups, and in favour of the political status quo. This has the implication that we must avoid a blanket ban on political activism within political philosophy, and instead recognise the epistemic merits of political activism where it is due.